Supercomputer Predicted Tropical Cyclone

It’s the heart of hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, the ripest time for tropical cyclones to develop over these waters. But predicting whether or not a storm system will grow into a hurricane is difficult.

A new supercomputer model has taken a leap forward in this effort though, reproducing and predicting the birth of an Indian Ocean typhoon (also called a hurricane or cyclone) five days before it became a fully formed storm.

Cyclone Nargis, as it was named, hit the country of Myanmar on May 2, 2008, with its more than 105-mph (165-kph) winds and powerful storm surge killing more than 100,000 people in the Southeast Asian country — one of the 10 deadliest cyclones on record.

To save lives from the high winds, flooding and storm surges of tropical cyclones, forecasters need to give as much advance warning as possible and the greatest degree of accuracy about when and where a storm will occur, scientists say.

Bo-wen Shen of the University of Maryland used NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer and atmospheric data to simulate the birth of Nargis in the warm Bay of Bengal waters. (Tropical storms get their start from warm water evaporating off the surface of bodies of water.) This effort could help scientists better understand how to predict the formation of these killer storms particularly in this region, where the meteorology and monitoring of cyclones is hampered by a lack of data.